Exeter Book Riddle 26 (according to the numbering of the Anglo-Saxon Poetic Records)George Philip Krapp and Elliott Van Kirk Dobbie (eds), The Exeter Book, The Anglo-Saxon Poetic Records, 3 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1936), http://ota.ox.ac.uk/desc/3009 . is one of the Old English riddles found in the later tenth-century Exeter Book.
The riddle is almost unanimously solved as 'gospel book'.
Text and translation
As edited by Krapp and Dobbie, and translated by Megan Cavell,Megan Cavell, 'Riddle 26 (or 24)', The Riddle Ages (11 August 2014). the riddle reads:
Editions, translations, and recordings
Editions
Krapp, George Philip and Elliott Van Kirk Dobbie (eds), The Exeter Book, The Anglo-Saxon Poetic Records, 3 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1936), pp. 193–94. Williamson, Craig (ed.), The Old English Riddles of the Exeter Book (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1977). Muir, Bernard J. (ed.), The Exeter Anthology of Old English Poetry: An Edition of Exeter Dean and Chapter MS 3501, 2nd edn, 2 vols (Exeter: Exeter University Press, 2000). Foys, Martin et al. (eds.) Old English Poetry in Facsimile Project (Madison, WI: Center for the History of Print and Digital Culture, 2019-). Online edition annotated and linked to digital facsimile, with a modern translation.
Translations
Jane Hirschfield, 'Some enemy took my life', in The Word Exchange: Anglo-Saxon Poems in Translation, ed. by Greg Delanty and Michael Matto (New York and London: Norton, 2011), pp. 164–67
Recordings
Michael D. C. Drout, 'Riddle 26', Anglo-Saxon Aloud (24 October 2007) (performed from the Anglo-Saxon Poetic Records edition).
References